irst-hand into
the very fact of things. Rude vestiges of poetic genius, of whatsoever
is best and truest, are visible in this man. A strong untutored
intellect; eyesight, heart: a strong wild man,--might have shaped
himself into Poet, King, Priest, any kind of Hero.

To his eyes it is forever clear that this world wholly is miraculous. He
sees what, as we said once before, all great thinkers, the rude
Scandinavians themselves, in one way or other, have contrived to see:
That this so solid-looking material world is, at bottom, in very deed,
Nothing; is a visual and tactual Manifestation of God's-power and
presence,--a shadow hung-out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite;
nothing more. The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they
shall dissipate themselves "like clouds"; melt into the Blue as clouds
do, and not be! He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells
us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set
on that to _steady_ it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like
clouds"; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck,
and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from
it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence
everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be
named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all things whatsoever,
was continually clear to this man. What a modern talks-of by the name,
Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine thing;
not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine
enough,--saleable, curious, good for propelling steamships! With our
Sciences and Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the _divineness_, in
those laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well
forgotten, I know not what else were worth remembering. Most sciences, I
think, were then a very dead thing; withered, contentious, empty;--a
thistle in late autumn. The best science, without this, is but as the
dead _timber_; it is not the growing tree and forest,--which gives
ever-new timber, among other things! Man cannot _know_ either, unless he
can _worship_ in some way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead
thistle, otherwise.

Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mohammed's
Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which he
permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practised,
unquestioned from